November 1 to November 9
The Banff Centre, Banff, Alberta, Canada
Information: 403.762.6675
Tickets: 800.413.8368
With 26 albums to his credit, Canadian music icon Bruce Cockburn has spent the last 40 years sharing his experiences and musical talent with the world. Cockburn, known for his philosophical, political, and intellectual lyrics, travelled to Nepal for the first time in two decades in November of 2007. Accompanied by filmmaker Robert Lang, the singer/songwriter visited Humla, a remote district in the northwest corner of the country, to document Return to Nepal, Cockburn’s quest to witness the spiritual and cultural endurance of an area that was officially closed to foreigners the first time he visited.
One of 50 film finalists chosen from over 250 entries from 37 countries, Return to Nepal will be screened at the 2008 Banff Mountain Film Festival on November 8 and 9. Over the nine-day festival, audiences will experience the world’s best films chronicling the passions and obsessions of mountaineers, endurance and extreme athletes, and environmental and cultural advocates.
The Festival opens November 1 and 2 with a lineup of five full-length films, including Stranded — I’ve Come from a Plane that Crashed in the Mountains. Thirty-five years after a plane crash left them 12,000 feet up on a snow-packed ridge in the Andes (source for the bestseller Alive), survivors and their children revisit the crash site with director Gonzalo Arijón. They disclose intimate details from their 72-day experience, including the precise moment when they realized that their only hope was to eat human flesh. In Zum Dritten Pol (To the Third Pole), 90-year-old Norman Dyhrenfurth, who guided the first Americans to the top of Everest in 1963, tells his parents’ story: mountaineers and filmmakers Hettie and Günter led expeditions to the Himalayas in the 1930s, where they set world climbing records and captured the first moving pictures at high altitude.
The popular Radical Reels film night returns Tuesday, November 4, hosted by climber Timmy O’Neill. A line-up of high-adrenaline shorts showcase skiing, snowboarding, speed riding, mountain climbing, and BASE jumping — Canadian climber Sonnie Trotter takes on a steep rock buttress beneath a historic Scottish castle in If You’re Not Falling. An all-new technical trials riding film, Crux, stars mountain bikers Ryan Leech, Thomas Ohler, and Dylan Korba.
On Friday, November 7, the Snow Show unveils the latest offering from Teton Gravity Research. Under The Influence tracks professional skiers and snowboarders on terrain around the globe, from Alaskan ridges to Grand Targhee park jumps. The show also includes Hand Cut, a film by 22-year-old director Nick Waggoner that mixes on-mountain action with ski town history in Aspen, Telluride, and Revelstoke.
Festival screenings on November 8 and 9 dig into the history, culture, and sport of the mountains. Among the films, The Last Nomads follows Canadian author and linguist Ian Mackenzie to Borneo as he searches for the remnants of a hunter-gatherer culture, the Penan, travelling through a series of settlements and moving closer to the last reported nomadic camp.
The Rocky Mountain Sherpas will screen their avalanche education film, The Fine Line, a collaboration of expert skiers, snowboarders, snowmobilers, and climbers with the world’s leading avalanche professionals. Directed by Dave Mossop and produced by Malcom Sangster, who both lost four friends to an avalanche in 1997, the film features footage of massive slides, epic riding, year-long time-lapses, first-hand accident accounts, and a pitch for responsible backcountry adventure.
On Saturday evening, November 8, the director of Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog, travels to Antarctica for Encounters at the End of the World, a story of the men and women who live at this polar extreme, risking their lives in search of cutting-edge science.
On Sunday, November 9, an international jury will announce the Best of the Festival awards. Jury members include Jim Donini, president of the American Alpine Club, Canadian producer Patrick McCloskey, Brian Hall, climber and former co-director of Britain’s Kendal Mountain Film Festival, French climber Christian Trommsdorf, and Josune Bereziartu, considered one of the top female sport climbers in the world.
Founded in 1976, the Banff Mountain Film Festival has become the biggest and best-known mountain film festival in the world. Accompanied by the Banff Mountain Book Festival, it is held annually at The Banff Centre in Banff, Alberta, Canada. Following the festival, films are selected for the popular Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour, which takes Banff films on a circuit around the globe.
Media accreditation for the 2008 Banff Mountain Festivals.
More information and full schedule of 2008 Banff Mountain Festivals events and films.